There and Back Again
by Hatake Iruka
Summary: Sarah... No, Sakura, she corrected herself had been walking for five days since she was released from the gate. Back towards Konoha and the Hokage that had damned her.


Walking...

Sarah... No, Sakura, she corrected herself had been walking for five days since she was released from the gate. No sign of the amount of time that had passed since she was pushed into that ugly and yet comforting world was evident in her journey back.

Back towards Konoha and the Hokage that had damned her.

The world Sakura had dwelled in for the past ten years was vastly different, in which humanity was revealed in human beings at its best, and most importantly, its worst.

Neither pausing nor facial expression was evident in her physical demeanor as she let her hatred, fear, and sorrow take her back to that place.

Austria. Poland. Birkenau. Block 11. Second Hall. Seventh Cell.

Many a friend, or at least fellow prisoner had lost their lives in the courtyard in front of the Wall of Death. Had she known the moment she set foot past the gate what trials that were to come, she would have hung herself or have given an SS officer a reason to kill her. Simple as that.

Unlike most persons imprisoned, Sakura had been conditioned for torture, starvation, and mental games, but being a ninja was no guarantee or preparation for surviving in a concentration or labor camp. The absence of chakra itself led her to the belief that she had not arrived yet to the destination on the other side of the gate, but that a horrible nightmare come to her mind was driving her insane. Sanity itself could not be kept as the gate she had been forced through should not have even existed. Parallel worlds? No such thing. Only in fantasy novels or the crazy ideas of a mad scientist.

If only that had been true. Then Sakura would not have been Sarah Heimler, 14 year old good Jewish girl, living during what was dubbed by all of those involved WWII.

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Every step taken to reunite Sakura with Konoha was painful and taxing on her body. Although ten years had passed in the gate, her body was still that of a 14 year old, just the same as it had been on the other side. Curious to her observations, Sakura had not aged during her stay in European hospitality, but remained in a halted state of physical growth.

It had been a blessing and a curse, hidden through out her stay in the large portion of what was generally known as Europe. Yes, she had to pretend that she was ageing, but she had been able to physically endure much more than any of her fellow prisoners.

Prisoners... Few of the people that ever made it to the camps could be listed as prisoners. For what crime had they committed? They did not abandon their village, commit any crime, or even did anything to be incarcerated, except they were unwanted. The scapegoats that they were for an economically struggling nation that placed blame with racism on a people who were just the same as they were. Jews, Gypsies, Gays, and so many other subgroups that needed to be cleansed from the general good and Arian populous.

The great bloodline wars of the Mist Country was the only incident in the Shinobi Nations that Sakura could compare what the Americans had dubbed as the Holocaust. People slaughtered with only the justification being that of blood. It seemed to be one nightmare after another, first segregation, then no holding office, followed by the ghettos, the SS, people being rounded up in the middle of the night, and finally the Nazi's "greatest achievement" the camps. The "Final Solution" to the "Jewish Question" as it was hailed by Germany and those of the Nazi party.

The first three years were a haze of learning a new language, geography, history, government, and just about everything that could be imagined. The family that she had been adopted by from the orphanage was the Heimler family. A nice and loving Jewish family with only one child, a young boy named Isaac, who at first glance looked like Itachi incarnate. Terrified had been her first reaction upon seeing Isaac, but he was only a child and she put her past behind to greet the new life in Germany. Never knowing that he was indeed Itachi and that she would love him with the utmost affection, risking her very essence to shield and protect him from a world that would lead to his madness and the slaughter of the Uchiha clan.

In hindsight, Sarah Heimler could have cared less about the Uchiha clan. She had seen train full after train full of people led straight to the gas chambers or crematorias. At least in his twisted mind, Itachi had truly believed that the Uchiha's deserved death, after all, he knew of the injustices of the world, better than anyone else in the Shinobi Nations besides her.


End file.
